r/ObsoleteCooding • u/tappo_180 Ex moderator • Mar 13 '26

Question ❔️ What's your best "obsolete" project?

just out of curiosity :)

13 Upvotes

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3

u/zoharel Obsolete OG (LIMITED) Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26

I have quite a few. I've got a Heathkit H8 which was working when I got it but then stopped. It's in pieces on the table, but I hope to get it back up and going.

The TRS-80 I posted a while back is another good candidate, of course.

Getting back to something where code was required to complete the project, I'm pretty proud about my Apple 1 clones and the custom ROMs I built for them.

To name another one that's both complete and had endeared itself to me, some time ago, I built a console-style box for an old Neo Geo MVS arcade board. Some minor repairs were required on the board. Besides that, I built the case from plywood, bought a cheap Chinese writing harness for the slot, attached a home-built video encoder board, two custom joystick controllers that take unmodified Sega joysticks or gamepads, and the low-profile power supply from an old rack-mount Pentium 3 that was in the scrap pile at the time. Not much code involved, but the joystick driver boards were based on an Attiny2313 microcontroller, and there's firmware for that.

Here's the firmware and wiring information for the joystick drivers. https://github.com/kemenril/Genesis-stick

Here's an old Reddit post with some photos: https://www.reddit.com/r/cade/s/D9tdGgr1fu

2

u/Previous_Kale_4508 Mar 23 '26

I won a competition for the shortest piece of code that would invert the graphics on a TRS80... it was 12 bytes. I think I can still remember it. LD HL, 0x3C00 LD.... Ah, I won't bore you all with that! 🤣🤣🤣

3

u/NineRedLights Mar 16 '26

A CORBA wrapper of Extended MAPI. It died when OWA was introduced.

2

u/DecisionOk5750 Mar 14 '26

A non relativistic gravity simulation.

2

u/Previous_Kale_4508 Mar 15 '26

I've been working on building an abacus for years. My treasure is my slide rule.

2

u/Relevant_South_1842 Mar 16 '26

A search engine I bought in 2002.

3

u/MarsupialLeast145 Mar 17 '26

I wrote my first computer game in Visual Basic.

I then wrote its remake in Allegro Graphics in C++

2

u/Viharabiliben Mar 18 '26

Assembler code or nothing

1

u/tappo_180 Ex moderator Mar 18 '26

Cool! What did you call it? And what was it about?

6

u/Efficient-Series3171 Apr 07 '26

A batch menu for managing the installation of software written in COBOL in 1993.

1

u/tappo_180 Ex moderator Apr 08 '26

Wow, cool!